Explore Tool

Legacy - check out our Synoptic Data Viewer for a supported and improved viewer

Synoptic's Explore Tool is designed to allow anyone to see public weather data aggregated and distributed by our Weather API. You can build this exact same platform using our API.

What can I do

Start by choosing your mode (Current Weather, Metadata Explorer, or Station). Each mode has a similar set of controls, and the map will stay in the same place between modes.

Current Weather

Choose the variable to view and unit, and look around at the most recent observation of the selected parameter. Only the first report of the given parameter is displayed.

Available Variables

Temperature - Assuming you know what this is
Precipitation - The total integrated amount of precipitation reported by this station over the most recent period of time selected. Utilizes the Synoptic Precipitation service.
Wind - The wind speed and direction where the color and number indicate speed, and the arrow icon indicates the direction the wind is blowing.
Solar - Typically this means the downwelling shortwave solar radiation received at a point in W/m^2
Pressure - Mean sea level pressure derived from local station temperature and pressure measurements and extrapolated to a consistent elevation for meaningful comparison between stations even at different elevations.
Data Age - The number of hours since the last time an air temperature observation was made, up to 7 days.

Metadata Explorer

This is the default mode, and is designed to allow you to discover available stations. Make selections in the control menu, and click "Find & display". A "Show visible" button is also available to view every active platform in your visible map area. Choose an option other than "Map" to view the result of your selections different ways.

Station Mode

Get to know a single station, from current and recent data, to metadata and history information.

Developer tools

To help you start building applications using our API products, the bottom of the page has an orange "how can I get this data" button - click it to see an explanation of the Weather API query that gave this data.

Additionally you can enter a full Weather API query (without a token even) replacing https://api.synopticdata.com/v2/ with https://explore.synopticdata.com/ and see the query made and explained for you.